ABSTRACT
One of my favourite images reproduced in this book is the diagram of the design of an orchard from Gervase Markham’s 1635 book The english husbandman (Figure 1.13). Its purpose is to assist the landowner in the “orderly placing of your trees.” Plum trees form a square (“as it were a fence or guard about your great quarters”) around apple or “other greater fruit” trees that are “placed in such artificiall rowes that which way soever a man shall cast his eyes, yet he shall see the trees every way stand in rowes, making squares, alleyes, and divisions, according to a mans imagination” (123-4). In addition to producing pleasant vistas, the equidistant organization of the trees optimizes yields and makes it easier to harvest the fruit. But the picture is not of trees or fruit, and it doesn’t show the arrangement of the orchard from the point of view of the eyes and imagination that are so gratified by the arrangement. The image is of an organized display of dots, some larger, some smaller; the illustration is about geometry as an instrument by which we occupy space and turn territory into land, land into estate, and estate into sustenance and wealth. The diagram is not about seeing the orchard so much as it is about being the gentleman whose mastery of the agricultural and horticultural versions of applied mathematics organizes dirt, water, and sunshine into power, money, and social identity. Diagrams of this sort are neither iconographic nor narrative: they have no lesson to deliver, and no story to tell. And as they lack a point of view that we can occupy, they are not about early modern subjectivity as we have come to understand it. Nonetheless, the volume and ubiquity of illustrations of this sort, which appear in thousands of examples in a wide range of genre in texts for every class and type of reader, argue for their importance as ways of imagining the early modern world.
